“Don’t let them drop us!” Landline users protest AT&T copper retirement plan | California hears protests as AT&T seeks end to Carrier of Last Resort obligation.::California hears protests as AT&T seeks end to Carrier of Last Resort obligation.
“Don’t let them drop us!” Landline users protest AT&T copper retirement plan | California hears protests as AT&T seeks end to Carrier of Last Resort obligation.::California hears protests as AT&T seeks end to Carrier of Last Resort obligation.
Is there a reason to maintain a legacy network and not switching to the fiber one?
You assume there’s going to be a switch. They’ve done this playbook before and left towns completely cut off.
Yes. Because it still works and hasn’t all been replaced yet.
The burden is on the telcos to prove otherwise and justify all the subsidies they got to wire unprofitable areas.
Laying fibre is really expensive - in really rural areas it could be $100k+ per subscriber, so you will never see a return on investment for doing that.
The original deal that the telcos struck was that the government would foot a big chunk of the bill of replacing the copper network with fibre even in places where it would make good business sense to do so (and arguably the telcos could have paid for themselves), on the proviso that they also either a) lay fibre; or b) maintain the copper network; in places where it makes no business sense to do so. On balance, the telcos came out well ahead on the deal, but still want to pick option C - none of the above, we take the money and run.
Fiber isn’t that much. RDOF in the US is proving that it’s averaging about $1000 per home to lay fiber. Adjusted for inflation, that’s cheaper than copper was 100 years ago. At $80-$120 ARPU, the ROI is a few years at most.
I’d argue the issue is that these regulated monopolies are bloated to the point that they just don’t have the money to lay fiber.
Look at the cash sheets of all the ISPs… They all make the vast majority of their profits on the internet infrastructure and services, but blow it all on everything else they do… TV, VoIP, mobile VNO, sports teams rights, and other stupid crap.
And yet, a local company in my state just ran fiber to 5000 homes in my area for what I told was 1 million. They used directional drilling, it was cheap and easy. Then all the sudden my local phone and cable company “also” put in fiber.
So while I’m in a suburb, I know for a fact these guys are all over the state and growing, including rural (and so is the local telco/cableco). I challenge that 100k number, that’s bullshit telco numbers. The word is unprofitable, it is unprofitable to run fiber when you are the only competitor.
Rural could mean a km out of town there’s a few km of houses spaced out by an acre or two along a well maintained road.
Or it could mean over an hour from the nearest town, down first a well maintained road, then a gravel road, then a dirt road surrounded by dense forest and/or lakes/swamp, there’s a community of 6 families each 5km from their neighbours.
If the total distance is longer than 100km (60 miles), it’ll need a repeater/amplifier, which also needs power.
At some point it becomes more worthwhile to establish a wireless connection, but even then you either need a satellite (at geosynchronous orbit, which has high latency), a constellation of satellites at a lower orbit, or a series of towers with line of sight of each other (or line of sight plus atmospheric bouncing).
We’re not talking about the average case, but there are extreme cases that I wouldn’t doubt cost a large amount that will never be recouped via reasonable subscription fees.
Laying copper was just as expensive. This is a cost cutting measure.
When I lived rurally, I had two choices - landline or edge cellular network which was unreliable. I also had the absolute best connectivity off all of my neighbors because not only was I the only one able to have an account on the ISP’s over-subscribed DSL line (at a whopping 1.5 Mbps), I was also fortunate enough to have the house with the highest elevation - literally on top of the hill. No one else had any cell reception at all. Eventually AT&T actually gave me a femtocell box, which routed all of my cellular calls across my shitty DSL, but they weren’t having to pay the fees to the edge provider.
Part of being granted monopoly rights when doing things like laying lines is that you have to take the good with the bad.
Copper lines have backup in the network to power them during outages but fiber relies on power inside the house which is unlikely to have a battery backup in the event of a blackout
Ziply fiber ONT have a little battery on them for exactly this. Seems to last around 4 hours in my experience. Seems reasonable to me.
Yes and no, you’d need a modem with a backup too. Where I am ONT and Modem are generally provider equipment and serial/ addresses for ONTs are used to enable them so they couldn’t just use anything.
They did get an all in one with a battery but the regulations wouldn’t allow for it because it closed the customer in to that provider.
Ziply ONT does the fiber translation and just spits out ethernet which you can plug into anything you want. I use it with a little 4port 2.5G router box and opensense. So I’ve just got a basic APC UPS for my router to keep it alive as well
It must be a point to point network to allow for a spurious Pants though, correct?
Not just houses, the power requirements in eg regional switch buildings are serious too, not something a battery will sustain for too long.
We’re currently phasing out copper connections in the UK. It’s now at the “stop-sell” phase for several regions (new copper connections cannot be provisioned).
When fibre connections first arrived, OpenReach (the main network) would supply the connection with a battery backup unit (BBU).
Nowadays, they’re only supplied to users with specific needs.
I’ve considered fitting a UPS to my networking, but decided it just wasn’t worth it.
We’ve had one power cut in the last 5 years, vs the cost of running a UPS for all that time, I’m not that fussed!
I have family that lives outside of LA, that are still on copper lines for phone and internet. How, idk.
Also, our neighborhood just got fiber access a couple months ago, and we live in a decently large city.
Copper landline for many, is the only option available that isn’t satellite.